1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a learning tool, and more particularly to the utilization of phonetic symbols to guide learners to the correct English pronunciation.
2. Description of Related Arts
As English is one of the most widely used languages in the world, many people would like to acquire good command of it. However, different people learn by different methods, in which learning English through English phonetic symbols is one of the common methods. Currently, the most popular English phonetics are the Kenyon-Knott Phonetics, the Jones Phonetics and the Webster Phonetics. Despite the three types of phonetics have been in use for decades, each of them has a certain degree of flaws.
First, both Kenyon-Knott and Jones Phonetics take the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as their phonetic symbols. Although the IPA has the advantage of being able to be used as phonetic symbols for other languages, however, for learners who only wish to learn English, IPA becomes an extra burden because the IPA has a lot of unfamiliar and easily mistaken symbols, and many symbols that can be found in the English alphabet but are pronounced differently.
As for the Webster Phonetics, because the original design of Webster Phonetic Symbols is very complicated, the Webster Phonetic Symbols is therefore not popular. Nowadays, the Webster Phonetic Symbols as appearing on dictionaries is in a simplified form, as a result, cannot compare with those in the original design.
Furthermore, as teaching materials, when analyzed, the above three phonetics share the following flaws:
1. The names of the phonetic symbols are not complete, causing inconvenience to both teaching and learning.
2. There is a lack of systematic analysis of the phonetics, such that most learners do not have a completely concept on the phonetics they are learning.
3. The usage of phonetic symbols is suitable for marking the pronunciation of English vocabularies in dictionaries, but not suitable for directly marking the pronunciation on an actual word in books. This is the upper limit of the function of phonetics.
Observing the above mentioned existing phonetics cannot provide sufficient help to learners, the inventor invented this new English phonetics, which not only improved the flaws of the above mentioned phonetics, but also provided a new classification of the full and half sounds of English vowels, so as to allow learners to correctly learn the characteristics of English vowels to achieve proper English pronunciation